Google’s Vint Cerf on Multimedia Conversation Modes

In an engaging roundtable dialogue at InterOp, Vint Cerf, Google’s Chief Internet Evangelist, answered questions, bouncing from topic to topic. Here’s one of my favorite moments, where he talked about free flow of collaboration.

We used to create networks purely for specific types of communications. We have a data network, a voice network and a TV network. But now that the data networks can carry all of those types of communications — and more — they’re muddled together. As a result, we’re starting to muddle them together in our own ways of interacting. It’s affording us the ability to comfortably slip into multimedia conversation modes, especially in the area of presence awareness, and with strangers.

In other words, we’re able to mix communications media in a way we haven’t seen in the past. One of Cerf’s examples: kids having voice chats while they’re playing video games. Watch what he had to say.